Design a global infrastructure change approval & risk assessment platform
PremiumCloud infrastructureHard
- Graph architecture
- Workflow orchestration
- Governance
Quick answer
This cloud infrastructure interview question asks you to design a global infrastructure change approval & risk assessment platform. Aim for a design that runs reliably and securely in the cloud at a sensible cost, then explain the services, regions, deployment and trade-offs. Interviewers want to see how you balance reliability, security and cost.
The problem
Design a Global Infrastructure Change Approval & Risk Assessment Platform. In large enterprises, unmanaged deployments and infrastructure changes are the primary cause of outages. Your platform acts as the intelligent gatekeeper for all CI/CD pipelines and manual infrastructure modifications.
When a change request is submitted (e.g., "Deploy v2.0 of PaymentService" or "Modify Security Group X"), the system must synchronously calculate a risk score by determining the change's blast radius across the enterprise dependency topology. Based on this score, the system orchestrates a stateful approval workflow—automatically approving low-risk changes while routing high-risk changes to appropriate human owners. Once approved, the system unblocks the waiting CI/CD pipeline.
What must a global infrastructure change approval & risk assessment platform do?
- Risk Assessment: Intercept change submissions and calculate an automated risk score based on historical failure rates and dependency blast radius.
- Topology Traversal: Traverse the enterprise dependency topology (up to 5 levels deep) to identify all downstream systems impacted by a change.
What scale should you design for?
Use these numbers in your estimates.
The scale numbers unlock with this questionUnlock
Key concepts
- Graph architecture
- Workflow orchestration
- Governance
- Rule engine
- Durable state
How you’ll practise
- Requirements
- Environments and topology
- Deployment pipeline
- Reliability and disaster recovery
- Observability and cost
- Wrap-up
Lala, personalized to you, gives a hint when you ask and reviews your design when you are ready.
What do interviewers look for?
In any cloud infrastructure design round.
- Clarifies availability, security and cost targets
- Chooses managed services with reasons
- Plans regions, zones and failover
- Covers identity, secrets and network boundaries
- Explains deployment, rollback and observability
- Keeps an eye on cost as usage grows
Questions people ask about this interview question
- Which design type is this question?
- It is a cloud infrastructure question. You design a global infrastructure change approval & risk assessment platform and explain your choices the way you would in an interview.
- Is this question asked at entry level?
- It is marked Hard. It suits engineers preparing for senior interviews, where you are expected to drive the discussion and go deep on trade-offs.
- What should I cover first?
- Start with the workloads, the availability target and the security and cost limits. Agree on scope with the interviewer before you design anything.
- Can I practise it for free?
- It is a premium question. Sign up and unlock it once for 10 credits; it then stays unlocked. When you finish, Lala, your personalized AI mentor, can review your design for 30 credits.
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Updated · Written by the SevyDevy team